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Immoral and Impractical

Three recent stories have moved me to write about the death penalty, a clearly immoral and impractical method of punishing criminals that we should have abolished ages ago, along with virtually all other developed democratic nations.

Second was the news, which we wrote about on our editorial page today, that prosecutors in Philadelphia have decided to stop trying to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing a police officer, Daniel Faulkner, in 1982. That’s nearly 30 years ago. There are 207 convicts on Pennsylvania’s death row, 50 of them sentenced 20 years ago or longer. This is just more evidence of what Justice Harry Blackmun said in 1994: “The death-penalty experiment has failed.”
The third bit of news came from Connecticut, where a second man was sentenced to death last Friday for the vicious murders of a woman and her daughters in the town of Cheshire. Politico reports that representatives in the state legislature who oppose capital punishment were waiting for these sentences to come down before making their next move. They think they might succeed in abolishing the death penalty in 2012, now that the Cheshire case is out of the way.

I have enormous sympathy for those who want the Cheshire murderers dead. (If the victims had been my wife or child, I would.) And I get that the Cheshire case made abolition politically untenable. That said, there is no moral justification for believing that the death penalty should be abolished— just not for two especially heinous murderers.

There is, fortunately, a growing national dissatisfaction with capital punishment. Sixteen states don’t allow executions, and eight of the states that do have not killed a prisoner in 12 years or more. A Gallup poll conducted in October showed that while a majority of Americans still support the death penalty, that number has dropped by almost 20 percentage points in the past 17 years. And support drops even further when people are given a choice between executing prisoners and locking them up for life with no possibility of parole.

The poll also showed a growing awareness that the death penalty is not administered fairly. Capital punishment is imposed in a racially biased way. People on trial for their lives do not have reliable access to reliable counsel. Even the mechanics of actually killing convicts are flawed:Several states have had nightmarish problems with the “cocktail” of drugs used to executive prisoners.

Activists and legislators seem to be responding to this shift in public opinion, and there are indications that Maryland, Kansas, and Connecticut could get rid of the death penalty in the near future.

My suspicion is that a solid majority of Americans would be comfortable with a country-wide repeal (there was no social unrest when the Supreme Court voided state death penalty laws in 1972). They just need leaders who can see the right thing, and do it. Too bad they are in such short supply these days.